I crept back to my compartment. I didn’t make a speech to my fellow travellers.
On the ferry to France, I felt my purpose renewed. My lustful body was lost property. In Paris, I would be pure. No more self-deception. No more frittering my time looking for noble minds at tennis clubs. I’d been a terrible Uranian◦– we should be scholars, but I’d never stuck to any kind of study. I turned to Christopher.
“I didn’t bring anything to read. Do you…?”
I wondered if he would produce A Problem in Greek Ethics and the deck would ring with cries of recognition. But he pulled out a slim tome from the Theosophists. I winced at the opening sentence: Kâmaloka as it is called in Sanskrit… But then the tone altered. The author was speaking of something termed the astral plane. He assured me that the astral plane was absolutely real. As real as Charing Cross. I missed Charing Cross already. I was persuaded of his common sense.
I read about the astral body, a thing apart from the fleshly body. The concept gripped me. (Of course it did: I had more-or-less eloped with a man I didn’t desire, and I wished to be so spiritual that his hairy hands wouldn’t distress me.)
I read that my astral body could fly through the air, if I desired it. No, if I put my mind to it.
At our Parisian hotel Christopher slept. In my room, I prepared to make a further, audacious journey.
The book on astral travel had frustratingly little in the way of instruction. I lay on my bed, conscious of my sweating back. The boy from the train drifted into my mind, and I pushed him away. I pushed away all fleshly things◦– I pushed myself out of my body.
I left. I lifted. It had worked. I hovered.
I feared to look down on my own fleshly body, so I passed on, up, through the ceiling of the hotel room. I was naked. I was naked of myself, without a body. I wasn’t cold. I could hear, faintly, the horses and the music of the Paris street. But my only crisp sense was sight. I saw Paris◦– a glittering mosaic. I took it in at a glance and then looked up to the stars. Could I go up, I thought, until the lights of the stars and the lights of Paris were of equal size, constellations above and below me?
How to move? Against what could I push? Should I flap my arms? I had no arms. I saw the moon. I thought: there! And leapt.
Such a pace would have made my stomach sick but I had no stomach. I was gleeful at my lightness and speed. Nevertheless, I quailed at the prospect of the void between the planets. I’d forgotten most of what I’d read in Christopher’s small book. Would it be cold or fiery? In a perpetual storm? It was calm as a millpond and almost empty. Dust, small rocks, passed through me.
The pockmarked face of the moon grew closer, whiter. I thought the surface would become less stark, but it remained without colour, and without grey shades; it was all white planes and black shadows. I was dazzled◦– I blinked◦– I did not blink, having no eyelids. Then why was I dazzled, having no eyes? I found that if I opened every part of myself to perception, I could see-perceive with other-eyes, and look straight at the sheets of lava, shiny as a japanned table, which had previously blinded me.
No living world, this. No greenery in the crevices and crevasses (and no plants of other colours, either, Mr Wells). Severity everywhere in form as well as palette: sharp lava fragments piled like spillikins. I saw soundless avalanches rush down from the summits of volcanoes. I tried to listen with other-ears, and heard instead a great growling, like arguments shouted between nations.
Some of the lava and stones of this uninhabited land resembled ramparts and amphitheatres. I thought it an unsettling coincidence. Then I couldn’t be sure: soaring over one plane, I saw beneath me a shape like a fortress, perched over a riverbed. I thought I saw arches, pillars, fallen columns, an aqueduct, even? But perhaps they were spat out by the thousand local Etnas, or whittled by lunar hurricanes.
I longed to know but I found I couldn’t stoop or stop. I was exhausted. As soon as my efforts slackened, I felt, attached to me, a sort of silver cord that I somehow knew connected me to my fleshly body. It tugged me like the kind hand of a good friend on my shoulder: Come along, old boy, you’ve had enough.
I flew home. The moon was plucked from me, dwindled, became a coin in the sky.
The silver cord hauled me in. A good thing, too, I thought, as I approached the rooftops of Paris: I’d not remembered where in the city I was lodged.
Snap! I woke breathless and chilled. In my murky brown bedroom, the memory of that austere landscape was like a slap. It had been the most terrific experience of my life.
“Sounds like Verne,” Christopher said, ripping open a pastry.
“Like what?”
“That story by Jules Verne. Griffiths read it to us, at a picnic at college. In translation, of course.”
I nodded. I blew across a bowl of hot chocolate. I was enjoying, supremely, being back in my body. Knowing it as only one of my bodies. It took me a while to think through the implications of Christopher’s suggestion.
“Without eyes…” I began.
“What?” I’d interrupted him.
“Sorry◦– without my eyes, when I was travelling, I was perceiving through some other sense.”
“And?”
“I was perceiving things too far from my own experience for me to understand them. So I translated them into familiar forms. Perhaps with practice, I could see more truly…”
“I expect you were lucid dreaming!” he cried. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a dream state…”
“One travels in a dream state?”
He rolled his eyes.
“One thinks one travels. You make things up, you direct your imagination while you’re asleep.”
He was impressed how much I’d controlled my dream state, how far I had pulled the wool over my own eyes. He urged me to “travel” again.
But there were other things to occupy me. We had to find a flat, Paris demanded to be explored. And my cynical Wildean side sneered: really? Cities in space? Moon-men? Who are you, to explore the stars? Until the memory of my trip crumpled my chest like the end of a love affair.
I never had a firm opinion as to whether Christopher or I was right. But I didn’t travel again.
After a year, he was calling himself Christophe. I slunk back, treacherously, to England. “Oscar isn’t even released from prison, yet!” objected Christopher. But I missed Charing Cross. Christopher had made friends with French men, but I hadn’t: my sense of universal brotherhood had ebbed, and I couldn’t manage the vowels.
I thought, often, whether it would have been different if I’d made my speech on the train. If I’d allowed sincerity to conquer cynicism. I became, without meaning to, cold and distant. I was on a fixed path, unable to intersect with warmer men.
Christopher forgave me enough to take me, once or twice a year, on a trip. Each expedition had a fraction of the exhilaration of our Parisian exile: trunks packed, the funnel of a boat steaming. We looked for communities of Uranians in Sweden, India, Turkey, and (endlessly) Greece. My feelings of guilt towards my friend were as hefty as my luggage.
So now, as we found our cabins on the Carmania setting out for America, I bowed the knee to him again.
“I’ve forgotten to bring anything to read. Could I borrow something from your excellent little library?”
He drew out a pile of books. Amazingly, amongst them was the volume from our French trip, on astral travel. For sentimental reasons?
Once more, the book drew me in. I went to my bed as eagerly as a bridegroom. I would slip the bonds of earth. I would touch the face of heaven.